I’ve read an awful lot of truly bad April Fool’s Day jokes today, with a few brilliant ones mixed in. So why do I wish every day could be like April Fools Day?

Because we’re all skeptics on April 1. When you read a story online today, your first thought is probably “Is that really true?”

Frankly, that’s the reaction I wish more people had every single time they read something on the Internet, 365 days a year. Healthy skepticism is a good thing. If more reporters would check their facts instead of blindly regurgitating whatever they just read, the pool of information we all share would become immensely more worthwhile.

Meanwhile, here’s my contribution to the April Fools Day madness, over at ZDNet:

Save Windows XP? Ha! I have an even better idea

At my editor’s insistence, I put a big April Fools banner at the top of the post, and still—still!—some people thought I was seriously arguing that Microsoft should bring back Windows 3.1.

After I posted this, I heard from a reader who said he still has a PC running Windows 3.11 with AOL 3.0. “Really?” I said. “Can I get a picture?” No problem:

A few minutes later, I received the e-mail message that had been captured on this screen. The message headers contained a line I hadn’t seen in over a decade:

X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 60

How awesome is that?

By the way, if you have a TechNet subscription, you can download Windows 3.1, 3.11, or 3.2 along with MS-DOS 6.22. Trying to run that old stuff on a modern machine is a problem, though. For starters, you need a floppy disk drive. And a floppy disk. And given that the operating system was designed for a time when 4 MB of RAM was a lot, it tends to freak out when it sees 1000 times that much installed RAM.

Honestly, I don’t want to go back to those days, but it was fun seeing this.

Who knew this book-writing stuff was so time-consuming?

While I’m heads-down over in the corner here, please enjoy the latest installment of Wondermark, by David Malki, which you should all be reading regularly:

Back shortly.

I haven’t taken a close look at this site’s browser stats in nearly two years. The last time I looked was in mid-2008, shortly after the release of Firefox 3. At that time, Internet Explorer had a 57% share among visitors to this site and Firefox was just over 38%, with Safari and Opera fighting for scraps.

Things have changed a lot since then. Firefox is now up to version 3.6. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 roughly a year ago. And most important of all, Google Chrome entered the lineup. Google has a hit on its hands, and according to my stats Chrome’s success is coming at the direct expense of not just Internet Explorer but also Firefox.

To see the trends, I looked at three separate snapshots covering fall 2008, early 2009, and early 2010. Each snapshot was 30 days in length and included a minimum of 100,000 site visits.

Continue reading “Chrome takes a bite out of IE and Firefox” →

I remember hearing about Calista Technologies when Microsoft bought the company a couple years back. It looks like their work is about to see the light of day. This post from the Windows Virtualization Team Blog explains:

With Microsoft RemoteFX, users will be able to work remotely in a Windows Aero desktop environment, watch full-motion video, enjoy Silverlight animations, and run 3D applications – all with the fidelity of a local-like performance when connecting over the LAN. Their desktops are actually hosted in the data center as part of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or a session virtualization environment (formerly known as Terminal Services). With RemoteFX, these users will be able to access their workspace via a standard [Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)] connection from a broad range of client devices – rich PCs, thin clients and very simple, low-cost devices.

[…]

RemoteFX is not a new standalone product from Microsoft. Rather, it describes a set of RDP technologies – most prominently graphics virtualization and the use of advanced codes – that are being added to Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1; these technologies are based on the IP that Microsoft acquired and continued to develop since acquiring Calista Technologies…

The idea that your PC and its full computational resources can be available to you anywhere is really exciting. Can’t wait to see this stuff close up.

This hit my mailbox earlier this week but I’m just getting around to passing it along.

Ceton Corporation’s eagerly awaited quad digital cable tuner technology is delayed. The new date for retail availability is now May 31 (two months later than the previously announced date of March 31.

If you want to get one of the first units from the first production run, you can pre-order the  InfiniTV 4 now from any of the following retail outlets:

• Cannon PC
• Fluid Digital
• Zones.com

According to Ceton, all three outlets will require a valid credit card to place the order, although the card will not be charged until units ship on May 31. Don’t expect any discounts from the full retail price of $399 (plus shipping and taxes).

I’m curious from looking at this unit whether it will work in a low profile chassis. I’m also awaiting the first reviews. Has anyone actually gotten their hands on one yet?

I’m here in Las Vegas at the Microsoft MIX10 conference with some fellow Microsoft bloggers. Follow along as we liveblog the Day 1 keynote.

I laughed until I cried at the latest Wondermark:

Update: Thanks for all the inquiries, folks. This one is sold!

I’ve got a Dell Latitude XT, purchased in November 2008 that’s looking for a home.

Very thin, very light (3.5 pounds). Convertible form factor, with 12-inch 1280×800 screen. Core 2 Duo 1330 CPU, 3GB RAM, 80GB hard drive, Windows 7 Professional, all the latest drivers, very lightly used (I’ve replaced with a Latitude XT2). Under warranty until November 2011.

Pictures and specs are available the Dell Outlet site here. Similar configurations sell as refurbs at Dell Outlet for $850+.

 My price for this unit is $680, including shipping (US only).

If you’re interested, leave a comment below, including your real e-mail address (it won’t be published), or use my Contact form.

Are you ready to spring forward? In the U.S., at least, Daylight Saving Time begins this weekend.

I know because Windows told me so:

Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that we were falling back.

It’s hard to get used to this earlier start for DST.

Andy Ziegler, a Program Manager on the IE8 team, just published an interesting post on the IE Blog going into some technical details about how Internet Explorer keeps tabs separate from one another. The subject of tab isolation is fascinating, in a geeky way, and extremely relevant even to non-geeks, for two reasons. First, tab isolation is a reliability feature; if one tab crashes, you don’t want to lose all your other tabs. And second, it’s also a security feature, one that browser developers have been wrestling with for years in the form of cross-site scripting and other attacks.

Microsoft takes a lot of heat for being a follower in browser development, but as Ziegler notes, they’ve been ahead of the curve on this one:

On March 5, 2008, Microsoft released the first IE8 beta with Loosely-Coupled IE (or LCIE for short). This was the first mainstream implementation of tab isolation. On September 2, 2008, Google Chrome’s first beta released with “process isolation.” Mozilla Firefox has recently discussed an “Out of Process Plugins” (OOPP) or Electrolysis project aimed at isolating Firefox plug-ins, such as Flash, from the rest of the browser.

You can see the IE8 design at work if you open up a single tab and then check the Processes list in Task Manager. With one tab open, you’ll see two instances of Iexplore.exe. Why two?

IE8 isolates the frame process (title bar, back button, address bar, etc.) from the tabs processes (that show web pages). If anything causes a site to crash (an extension like Flash, or the rendering or scripting engine, etc.), the frame and other tab processes will not crash. IE isolates the whole tab – all of its code, data, and extensions – to keep IE resilient to webpages with issues.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed over the past year or so while working with IE8 is that there isn’t a predictable correlation between the number of tabs and the number of processes. For instance, right now I have 16 IE8 tabs open, but Task Manager shows only nine processes running:

I’ve heard some theories about how IE8 combines tabs into a single process while still maintaining the ability to recover in the event of a crash, but I haven’t seen any official documentation on the subject. Andy, if you’re looking for new blog topics, that’s a good one for you.

Update: I decided to explore a little more intently and found a great blog post from the IE support team that explains how IE manages the number of new tab processes. Geeky but interesting.

Ziegler’s post also contains a terse but interesting competitive analysis of the differences between the sandboxing approaches taken by IE and Google Chrome. Not surprisingly, he argues that Microsoft’s approach is fundamentally more secure. I’ll let you read and decide.

Finally, if your eyes bulged out a bit when you saw the memory in use by each one of those Iexplore.exe processes in the Task Manager shot above, you’re not alone. I watched that phenomenon for several months until I finally got a handle on what’s going on. The first time I saw a single process shoot up over 500 MB, it was fairly alarming, but it’s worth noting that this system has 10GB of RAM and isn’t close to running out of memory. As I’ve noted earlier, Windows believes in the philosophy that empty RAM is wasted RAM.

If I were to open this same assortment of tabs on a machine with, say 2 GB of memory, I’d see a very different memory usage pattern, with each process quickly surrendering memory when another process needs it.

And here’s what’s most interesting of all, and a testament to IE’s ability to recover. From Task Manager, I just forcibly ended the three processes that were consuming most memory on that list. As I killed each process, I saw the tab (or tabs) associated with that process reload in the browser. When I was all done, I hadn’t lost a single tab and Task Manager looked very different:

That’s 12 processes, totaling roughly 598MB of memory. Compare that with the previous load, which involved nine processes using 1,051 MB of memory. For those keeping score, that’s a 43% drop in memory usage. I don’t recommend randomly killing Iexplore.exe processes this way, but it’s comforting to know you can do so with no adverse consequences.